Q. Are there any guidelines about what kind and how many lights to put in your workshop? This guy has an 11x19 shop and wonders if one 4 ' light panel is enough.

A. Rob Johnstone "Sufficient lighting is as essential to good working as sharp tools. Natural light is best, particularly for finishing. Plenty of incandescent or flourescent light is fine. The guideline I would work with is this: seldom can you have too much light. Your shop lighting should come from many sources rather than a single source. I hate marking up a piece of wood and not being able to see the line I am drawing due to the shadow my combination square's rule is throwing. Scott Landis' The Workshop Book (Taunton Press), has an excellent section on lighting your shop."

A. Michael Dresdner "The short answer is no. For a much better, longer, and more complete answer, look in the new Setting up Shop book from Taunton Press by Sandor Nagyszalanczy. It contains a section on lighting the shop that covers amount, type, costs, color rendition, and many more issues well worth considering (though often ignored)."

A. Ian Kirby "Can you see OK to work? Is it too dim or too bright? Yes there are guidelines, but at the end of the day you need to make sure you have enough light to work. One panel doesn't sound like nearly enough to me."

Q. I am in the process of setting up a woodworking shop in my basement. The basement is dry, but can get humid on occasion. Should I be concerned about my woodworking equipment rusting? If so, what can I do to prevent it?

A. Rob Johnstone: "There are several products on the market that protect against rust. It pretty easy to prevent surface rust on the exposed areas of your equipment, but the hidden (or more accurately enclosed) areas are a bit trickier. It would not hurt one bit to invest in a de-humidifier: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

A. Michael Dresdner: "Congratulations, and welcome to the club! You are about to embark on a long and very satisfying career of perpetually yearning to buy new tools, and trying valiantly to shoehorn them into your shop.

"There are two things you can do to keep them from rusting, and I would suggest doing both. First, coat all the exposed (unpainted) surfaces with either paste wax, or one of the many rust preventative coatings (Boeshield, Slipit, etc.), all of which work even better than wax. Second, invest in a good dehumidifier and run it during the wet season. (See, I told you this would lead to buying new tools!)"

John Brock: I would say "No," based on personal experience. However, I'm fairly sure that 50 years from now, I'll be considered a Neanderthal and lucky to have lived so long for all of my bad habits.

Carol Reed: No.